Tagging insignificant cameos

Log said:
If you only want a character cosplaying search "character cosplay -character_(cosplay)"

This is somewhat flawed as it inadvertently excludes images where someone else also cosplaying as this character, e.g. post #563585.

Xabid said:
Many tags become much less useful when you have a bunch of people in an image, and being able to say "this is image has Jill with red hair smiling and Jane with green hair with an open mouth" would be more useful

I've been toying around, at the back of my head, with some ideas to semantically enrich the system, whereby existing tags can be (re)used in triple form to express such semantics ( Jill <has> red_hair ) or even things like ( Keine <glomping> Mokou ), while the individual tags themselves remain searchable as well, allowing incremental deployment, backwards compatibility, and having a nice fallback to multi-tag searches ("in some undefined combination", to borrow your words), particularly to allow you to find old images that haven't been migrated to the richer semantic form. Haven't really seriously thought it out thoroughly, though. And I'm pretty sure I've seen others mention similar ideas of using ontologies...

Soljashy said:
I think both cosplay and cameo would be more useful if they have the *_(cosplay) and *_(cameo) tags and not the base character tag as well.

And I don't. Again, I don't want cosplay excluded when searching for the base character, I consider it a perfectly relevant result. The same is true for cameos.

Especially for cameos, the point is to try and get rid of noise when people are searching for a character.

And how much of that noise is present exactly? I'd be surprised if it was more than 1% for the average character; do you seriously care if there is *one* extra result every 5 pages? If you do, I suggest some OCD treatment :)

Somebody pee in your flakes this morning, 葉月?

葉月 said:
And I don't.

Yeah, we got that. Suppose you were the only one who felt that way, though, is there any particular reason why you couldn't be bothered to search for *_(cosplay) or *_(cameo) as well?

葉月 said:
And how much of that noise is present exactly? I'd be surprised if it was more than 1% for the average character; do you seriously care if there is *one* extra result every 5 pages?

There's no real way to measure how many posts of a character are cameos at this point, but you're right, it's probably not a very high percentage. Still, people here seemed to think there's a benefit to excluding the base tag.

Question: Should the originating copyright tag of the cameo be added also? That is, if a Miku figure is making a cameo in a post, should that post be tagged Vocaloid? If we exclude the base character tag it seems that we should exclude the copyright as well.

Soljashy said:
Somebody pee in your flakes this morning, 葉月?

?

Yeah, we got that. Suppose you were the only one who felt that way, though, is there any particular reason why you couldn't be bothered to search for *_(cosplay) or *_(cameo) as well?

You mean other than the one I explained above several times, that there's *absolutely no hint* there are other relevant tags you need to search for?

There's no real way to measure how many posts of a character are cameos at this point, but you're right, it's probably not a very high percentage. Still, people here seemed to think there's a benefit to excluding the base tag.

And I'm asking people to give some data to back up their claims. If you want to make one scenario significantly harder and non-intuitive, I want you to justify it with the huge benefits some other, presumably vastly more popular scenario receives. So far I haven't seen anyone do that, besides personal leanings, and as far as those go, you already know mine.

Sorry, 葉月, I think I mistook your usual frank demanour for grumpiness there.

evazion said:
Question: Should the originating copyright tag of the cameo be added also? That is, if a Miku figure is making a cameo in a post, should that post be tagged Vocaloid? If we exclude the base character tag it seems that we should exclude the copyright as well.

That's a good question. The *_(cameo) tag would probably require the copyright to tagged as well. But the issue of whether to remove the base tag is still under debate, it seems.

Cosplay wasn't as big as clusterfuck as this is. There is no current tag pointing out cameos so unless someone goes through and at the very least tags cameos on a large portion of all images, even without subsequent tags, we have no way of knowing how many cameos there are or which format would better compliment them (assuming popularity is the major determining factor.)

augh, and where do you even draw the line as to what is a cameo?

I'm completely in favor of leaving these tags as they are. The more images I find when searching for something, the better, so long as what I'm looking for isn't drowned out. That way I'll find what I'm looking for, as well as stuff that at least one other person thinks may be related to what I'm looking for -- related enough to justify tagging it as such. How can that ever be a bad thing?

(EDIT: By the way, )Lalaca, if you don't want to peer at your screen, then don't. If you don't see the character there at first glance, and you are explicitly not looking for cameos, then you can immediately close that post. What good does it do you to search for the character anyway at that point? That doesn't make any sense to me.

If you MUST make yet another "class" of tags that are distinguished only by textual features (i.e. stuff in parentheses on the end), fine, but leave the original tags on there.

It was an off-hand comment, made mostly in jest.

Certainly, I have had moments where I had to go 'huh?' and try find to a tiny character in the corner of an image, but I've never raised complaint about it, and totally didn't mean to do so here.

As for keeping the base tags in, again, I have no issues with that. Now to be honest, I'm not too sure what you found so irksome about my previous post.

Lalaca said:
Now to be honest, I'm not too sure what you found so irksome about my previous post.

Pennies against dollars you got caught in collateral damage. Sometimes it's hard to internalise exactly who holds what opinion and what shades apply in a thread, so you got to be the representative for the crowd insisting on removing base tags. Ain't you proud? :)

Lalaca said:
Now to be honest, I'm not too sure what you found so irksome about my previous post.

Er, sorry, didn't mean to single you out. That just seemed like the statement in this thread which most obviously merited a response, lol. Anyway, my main point was that it's obviously better to include borderline cases in a tag than to exclude them. When they are included, people who want the borderline cases will get them, and people who don't want them will have to deal with a small* percentage of their search results being extraneous (from their perspective). When borderline cases are excluded, people who don't want the borderline cases, but people who do will be totally shut out, because it's normally impossible to find those cases any other way.

Adding "_(cameo)" tags would mitigate that issue somewhat, since there would now be a way for people who want to find borderline cases to find them, assuming they were tagged properly, but even then it would be a hassle, especially since (in my experience) disjunctive tag searches are either borked or very limited.

But more importantly, any tag will have borderline cases. This is a slippery slope. cosplay is one thing (because it's relatively well-defined as to what it means for a character to appear in a post only as a target of a cosplay as opposed to actually appearing in the post), this is another thing altogether.

*If the percentage of posts tagged with any given tag is not small, then it is probably a good idea to reevaluate what the tag even means in the first place, which is a different discussion.

Well, 0xCCBA696 has convinced me that it's a bad idea to exclude the base tags. If people feel cameos are worth tagging in more detail, the *_(cameo) idea seems to have attained jxh2154's approval.

Wait, what's the benefit of adding a *_(cameo) tag when we're also including the base tag?

スラッシュ said:
Wait, what's the benefit of adding a *_(cameo) tag when we're also including the base tag?

Well, you could still negative search it. Yeah, I know, it's not what we'd hoped for originally, but think about what 0xCCBA696 said. We've always been opposed to drowning out data that users could potentially be looking for.

It's also a hint for those suspecting problems with their eyes :)

As much as I don't want to say it, I don't currently see any useful way to accomplish this that is not clunky as all hell. Having yet another foo_(bar)styled tag is not a solution I can really condone, as it's no better than encoding metadata into filenames and paths. We've sort of painted ourselves into a schematic corner.

Exactly. So I say drop this whole idea.

Yeah, it's just something I thought might warrant some discussion. It looks like we've reached a concensus now. Let's just call the whole thing off.

... we have? I'm certainly glad you think so, but I wouldn't discount the possibility that there are people who posted on the first page who would disagree with that assessment...

By the way, "consensus" is a word unrelated to "census" - it's actually more related to "sense" - and so is spelled with an "s". There are annoyingly many English words like that, such as "supersede", "prophesy", etc.

Damn... Did I just spell that with a "c"? The one time in my life I sleep from seven to seven and this is what it gets me. Remind me never to do that again.

Also, indeed, consensus was overstating the issue. I'm sure if there are objections, they will be voiced, though.